Here are five tangible ways AI customer service empowers your team and protects customer relationships.
Graphic containing the 5 ways in which AI boost customer service
1. Set up customer service chatbots
Conversational AI customer service chatbots are trained to understand the intent and sentiment behind customer queries, making them ultra-efficient. They chat with customers casually to create a more human experience and handle large volumes of messages effortlessly. Every interaction adds new words, phrases and trending topics to their neural networks for future reference, so they can get better at offering the right resolution.
Integrating chatbots into your customer service operations helps customers connect with you on- or off-business hours and get timely, efficient assistance even when your staff is unavailable.
For example, online travel agencies Priceline and Booking.com are expanding their customer service offerings to include AI chatbot, Penny, in collaboration with ChatGPT. The chatbot is accessible as a 24/7 concierge, helps customers complete bookings and acts as a local guide to enhance guest experience.
If you prefer a rules-based chatbot over an AI, you can create one within minutes using Sprout’s Bot Builder on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Just select your chatbot profile and follow the wizard for instructions.
If you choose to go with a template, you will get a decision tree with predetermined rules and script options that will automatically populate in the configuration stage. You can also add additional rules, write custom copy for your chatbot responses and add pictures and GIFs. Once it’s set up, all customer conversations will stream directly into the Smart Inbox.
2. Analyze customer sentiment
Customers are spoiled for choice and difficult to hold onto. That’s why sales and marketing teams are teaming up with customer service to understand and overcome barriers to the traditional marketing funnel.
Companies like TikTok are already attuned to this new phenomenon. By creating hyper-personalized content and engagement driven by audience sentiment, they’re reinventing how customers interact with a brand.
AI capabilities like sentiment analysis draw insights from hundreds of customer conversations on social channels, CRM tools, chatbots or customer support calls to surface hidden sentiment on a variety of topics (including your competitors). You also get metrics on customer behaviors, purchase motivations and brand health—critical to customer service teams. For example, they may use this data to monitor tickets and take appropriate steps to avoid escalations.
These insights are also essential to cross-organizational teams, like marketing and sales, so they can adapt their efforts to better meet customer preferences. Think: Tailoring ads based on customer demographics, or differentiating messaging based on competitor insights from social listening.
Screenshot of Sprout Social’s Listening tools showing active topics from a range of social networks
Sprout enables you to track and analyze the sentiment of your social mentions on various networks and review platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Google My Business.
You can narrow sentiment search with keywords or within specific queries including complaints, compliments and specific customer experiences, all in one place. Use the sentiment analysis widget to monitor positive, negative and neutral mentions in real time or track changes in sentiment over time.
3. Quickly personalize customer interactions
Customers don’t want to be nameless—they want to have a personal connection to your brand. And empathetic, personalized customer service is essential to that end. It increases customer engagement, builds loyalty and fosters long-lasting relationships.
But writing tailored responses to every customer complaint and query isn’t sustainable especially when your team is managing customer requests from multiple channels.
This is where AI-enabled tools like Sprout level up your customer care tech stack.
For example, Sprout’s Suggested Replies help your teams respond faster to commonly asked questions on Twitter. They are powered by ML and semantic search algorithms that enable the tool to automatically understand the context of an incoming message.
These algorithms identify topics and themes, and suggest responses that are best applicable. Plus, your teams have total control over these messages to customize them for a more personalized feel and to add relevant details.
Sprout’s Enhance by AI feature, powered by our OpenAI integration, further boosts this capability. Customer service teams may quickly adjust their response length and tone to best match the situation.
Screenshot of how customer care teams can quickly customize messages and add relevant details for a more personalized feel when responding through Sprout Social
4. Increase team productivity
Employee burnout is a real issue for customer care leaders across industries, and AI customer service provides a much-needed respite. Intelligent tools make workflows transparent so team members have a unified view of all customer messages in a central location and task visibility to overcome duplicacy.
For example, ING Turkey collaborated with conversational AI company, Sestek, to develop an intelligent, conversational interactive voice response (IVR) system to manage collection calls that are automatically diverted to it. This increased efficiency, freeing up support staff for other valuable interactions.
The AI tool handles complex customer interactions effortlessly and reduces the workload of ING’s overwhelmed customer service team by half. It has also lead to increased customer payments by 60%.
5. Collect trends and insights
Topic clustering and aspect-based sentiment analysis give you granular insights into business or product areas that need improvement, by surfacing common themes in customer complaints and queries. This includes insights on customer demographics and emerging trends—key to guiding your customer care strategy.
For example, use this data to enrich your resource center with information covering what’s most important to your audience or update frequently asked questions (FAQs) from customers. This improves transparency for potential customers in the decision-making phase who are browsing products.
Sprout’s AI and machine learning capabilities enable you to extract key insights from social and online customers to give a centralized view of customers’ feedback and experiences. Your teams never miss a message and resolve queries with contextual insights for swift, meticulous service.
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